It took almost 18 months, but I finally broke my write-a-blog-post-every-week streak. Ah well, guess I’m not perfect.*

To be fair, breaking the streak meant traveling to Paris, San Francisco, and then Georgia within a month, along with some personal things that I’m not ready to share here (yet), so it wasn’t anything small that broke the mold.

1. My mind, body and soul are very important to me. I promise to take care of them by…

Treating my body with respect for the hard work it does so elegantly. Cherishing its strength and helping it achieve its best level of health. Feeding my brain art, literature, music, and puzzles to keep it sharp and active. Filling my soul with art and music, and beauty so that I might maintain my divine connection with the Lord and Lady.

With the rise of religions based on books laws became something governed by god as well as secular authorities, this led to situations in which you could ask forgiveness of him (all book religions have a male deity as their center), do penance as assigned by his intermediaries, and then be forgiven absolutely. This is a simple, attractive, way of administering and judging morality. (Granted, secular authority wouldn’t overlook a murderer, but at least one religion allowed for absolute forgiveness and entrance into heaven if one’s deathbed confession was heartfelt and sincere. So you could rob a bank, be shot, make a heartfelt confession, and then die and go to heaven.)

Pagans have no concept of sin like what exists in religions of the book; we don’t put our morality on our Gods, we take it onto and into ourselves. While there are many myths that offer direction for being a positive member of society, it is easy to see Them engaging in a variety of activities that society generally finds distasteful: adultery, theft, lying, deception, murder . . .

Everything we do, every choice we make, has consequences. Each choice is like a drop of rain into a basin of water, rippling outward.

An ethical code is more than a line or two of a poem, or even the entire poem. It is a structure that starts in childhood and develops in accordance with your experiences. Your code may not always provide an answer, nor will it necessarily be perfect. It does need to be cohesive.

How does it start?

Learn true honesty with yourself. This is not a punishment, it is the beginning of creating an accurate vision. It requires courage and a dismantling of the prejudices and nasty mind voice we often have learned to ‘hear’. It also requires learning to not blame others. No one can make us do anything, it is all our choice. This is true even when the choices are few (do this, or don’t), or terrible (work at that soul-sucking job or don’t eat). True honesty is a cultivation of vision that requires looking clearly at ourselves and the world around us without placing blame. In doing this you learn understanding. That leads to better knowledge of the causes behind your actions and decisions and the effects that will arise from your choices.

A storm is brewing, perhaps already broke about a fundraising effort by the (Budapestian) Dianic Witch, Ruth Barrett for her anthology, Female Erasure.With entries like “Transgender Rights: The Elimination of the Human Rights of Women,” “The Attack On Female Sovereign Space In Pagan Community,” and “Destruction Of A Marriage: My Husband’s Descent Into Transgenderism” it’s clear that this will be a manifesto of hate and exclusion.

June is Pagan Values month, and unlike previous years, I’ve actually been given a topic I can write about. (I’m not great with overly broad topics, it doesn’t usually stir my creative juices.) Today’s writing is “others and othering. What are your philosophies of conduct when around those very different from yourself?”

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that the large vast scene we call ‘paganism’ is also immensely diverse. There’s an old line you may have heard that sums it up beautifully: ask 10 pagans what paganism means and you’ll get 13 answers.(more…)

I’ve been meaning to write a book, a follow up to Magickal Connections, for years now. But it’s a daunting task, and I couldn’t get my ‘handle’, my thesis if you will. Then in late March I realized I had the title and all at once the whole outline came to me.

Peri-menopause is proving to be more difficult than I expected, although why I thought it would be another else, I’m not sure. Having spent two years attempting to get in better shape I find myself at the same place, nearly, that I was post-chemo. This (literally) depressing. (A mental state I wrestle with far too often to be healthy.)